March 14, 2011

Oh, I like to spread information that I find interesting. But people who seek it out will find it anyway, and I'm just annoying those who don't want to know. And I just don't touch that much of the universe so I'm not going to be spreading anything all that far. I'm not going to change the world.

I started out this blog in 2004 because Girlfriend had one. But she stopped hers soon thereafter. Early on it was kind of therapy. I printed bad poems, uploaded some of my songs, some of which were okay, I think. I've written some of my favorite conspiracy theories, but they've all pretty much proven to be true and nothing's changed. Oh well.

I used to write top ten lists of songs I liked, but I don't feel like it anymore. Music Fridays were my favorites.

Friends and anyone else interested who has my email or phone number or even address can find me. Then there's that Facebook thing.

I'd like to spend more time on music and writing, but not this writing. Of course, stopping one thing doesn't necessarily mean I'll put the free time to good use, and with or without the blog I've got plenty of free time.

So I'm just going to ease away from this and see what's next. Unless I change my mind, in which case I'll start up another blog. This one has gone on for almost seven years now.

March 13, 2011

Mrazik, a professor in the Faculty of Education's educational psychology department, and a colleague from Rider University in the U.S., have published a paper in Roeper Review linking giftedness (having an IQ score of 130 or higher) to prenatal exposure of higher levels of testosterone. Mrazik hypothesizes that, in the same way that physical and cognitive deficiencies can be developed in utero, so, too, could similar exposure to this naturally occurring chemical result in giftedness.

"There seems to be some evidence that excessive prenatal exposure to testosterone facilitates increased connections in the brain, especially in the right prefrontal cortex," said Mrazik. "That's why we see some intellectually gifted people with distinct personality characteristics that you don't see in the normal population."

Mrazik's notion came from observations made during clinical assessments of gifted individuals. He and his fellow researcher observed some specific traits among the subjects. This finding stimulated a conversation on the role of early development in setting the foundation for giftedness.

"It gave us some interesting ideas that there could be more to this notion of genius being predetermined from a biological perspective than maybe people gave it credit for," said Mrazik. "It seemed that the bulk of evidence from new technologies (such as Functional MRI scans) tell us that there's a little bit more going on than a genetic versus environmental interaction."

Based on their observations, the researchers made the hypothesis that this hormonal "glitch" in the in-utero neurobiological development means that gifted children are born with an affinity for certain areas such as the arts, math or science. Mrazik cautions that more research is needed to determine what exact processes may cause the development of the gifted brain.

He notes that more is known about what derails the brain's normal development, thus charting what makes gifted people gifted is very much a new frontier. Mrazik hopes that devices such as the Functional MRI scanner will give them a deeper understanding of the role of neurobiology in the development of the gifted brain.

"It's really hard to say what does put the brain in a pathway where it's going to be much more precocious," he said. "The next steps in this research lay in finding out what exact stimuli causes this atypical brain development."

March 12, 2011

Research findings published in the March 11 edition of the journal Science by an international team of noted anthropologists, including several from Arizona State University, who study hunter-gatherer societies, are informing the issue by suggesting that human ancestral social structure may be the root of cumulative culture and cooperation and, ultimately, human uniqueness.

Because humans lived as hunter-gatherers for 95 percent of their species' history, current foraging societies provide the best window for viewing human social evolution, according to the authors. Given that, the researchers focused on co-residence patterns among more than 5,000 individuals from 32 present-day foraging societies around the globe, including the Gunwinggu, Labrador Inuit, Mbuti, Apache, Aka, Ache, Agta and Vedda. Their findings identify human hunter-gatherer group structure as unique among primates.

Professor Kim Hill of ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is the lead author, along with Robert Walker of the University of Missouri. The collaborative effort involved ASU professors James Eder and Ana Magdalena Hurtado; ASU anthropology graduate student Miran Božičević; and anthropologists from SIL International, Dallas; Southern Methodist University, Dallas; Hawassa University, Ethiopia; Washington State University; Durham University, UK; University of Utah; and Stanford University.

Their finding showed that across all groups, adult brothers and sisters frequently live together, making it common for male in-laws to co-reside. They also found that it was equally common for males or females to move from or remain with family units. This is in contrast to other primate species, where either males or females move to another group at puberty.

A major point in the study is that foraging bands contain several individuals completely unconnected by kinship or marriage ties, yet include males with a vested interest in the offspring of daughters, sisters and wives. This organization mitigates the group hostility frequently seen in other apes and also promotes interaction among residential groups, thereby leading to the development of a large social network.

"The increase in human network size over other primates may explain why humans evolved an emphasis on social learning that results in cultural transmission," said Hill. "Likewise, the unique composition of human ancestral groups promotes cooperation among large groups of non-kin, something extremely rare in nature."

March 11, 2011

Those close to me know I’ve been working for years on a collection of songs to record. There are many issues as to why there’s been a logjam. I won’t bore you here.

Suffice it to say that a lot of the songs are about the failure of my marriage. That means that a lot of the songs are downbeat, to say the least. Even musically upbeat songs like “Count Each Misery” are lyrically devastating:

We had our plans all drawn up.I tried to make ‘em work.You needed one good handymanbut you got stuck with a clerk.I wish you were as satisfiedas I used to be with me.Now I get up every morningjust to count each misery.

You get the idea. There are other songs in the collection about what the hell is the meaning of life, about betrayals and failures and death. And looking at it I realized that there was damned little hope in the collection. Oh, I do a slowed-down version of “Daydream Believer” which is actually a hopeful song about a not-so-great situation, if you follow the lyrics. My version of that song isn’t very chipper (like the way the Monkees did it) but rather doleful. Cheer up, sleepy Jean.

Here’s another problem. I am working on songs I wrote during my failed marriage and in the immediate aftermath when I had good reason to be a Gloomy Gus. These days I’m feeling pretty damned good about myself and my situation. I’m living with the woman I love and who loves me. You know the expression: I can’t complain. But that’s precisely what I’m doing with this collection of music. And it’s a huge roadblock that needs to be busted through before I move to whatever my next batch of songs is going to be.

I needed some positive thinking music. A song to stick in there. The “hit” off the album, if you will. I was going through some old music files on one of my computer music programs and came across one called “She Looked Back”. If I have a music file without lyrics I often just give it a name. If and when I come up with lyrics for the music I can change the name to suit the lyrics. This music is years old. I’m not even sure if I had met my woman when I wrote it. Nevertheless, there’s a moment when the music and the idea for a song and the lyrics all begin to sync up, and it’s a part of the creative process I really enjoy.

(I’m about to give a musical explanation of the song, but since I’ve never been trained in music and can’t even read it, don’t expect this to be terribly precise.)

“She Looked Back” has probably the most complicated set of chord changes I’ve ever used. You don’t normally think of country music (and this collection of songs, for want of a better term, is kind of country-ish) as having lots of jazzy chords, but this one does. It’s built around generally unadorned piano chording. If the chords are “complicated” in structure then too much action within the playing of the chords further confuses the motion of the melody. And the melody is pretty simple.

The song starts out with a simple piano riff (the song is in the key of C), the line bouncing among C, D, E and G notes with maybe an F thrown in. When the first verse starts there is the first 2m7-5-1 progression. In every key there are various chords related to the root note. 2-5-1 progressions are extremely common in pop music. In the key of C the chords would be D minor, G and then the root, C. In this song I use Dminor7, Gsustained7 and then a Cadd2. The Dminor7 adds a C note to a Dminor. The Gsustained7 sharps the normal B to a C. And the Cadd2 adds a D to a C chord. What does all this do? It makes the chord change more interesting. The Dminor7 is a whole step away from the root, and musical tension eventually resolves to the root. But the Dm7 already is at the root (in that it contains a C) while it is away from it. Likewise, the Gsus7 has a C in it, so while it is supposed to oppose the root it also embraces it. It gently confuses the ear. The Cadd2 adds a D to a C chord, so while it’s supposed to be the final resolution the D again confuses the issue. Those three chords thus suspend the resolution, which is fine, they’re the first three chords of the song, but they are giving a general resolution without resolving.

If you don’t follow you’ll have to trust me on this.

The second line in the verse starts with a Cmajor9 instead of what more logically should be a C. This chord adds a B and a D to a C chord (which is C, G and E). Those notes again slightly confuse the ear. The mind knows generally where it’s going with the melody but the extra notes suggest a G chord. In fact, you could look at a Cmaj9 as a G chord within a C chord. Oh my! The song then moves from Cmaj9 to a Bbmajor7 which does not normally belong within the key of C. Most of the chord is one whole note down from a C, which gives the melody a feeling of dropping. But the major 7 of Bb is A, and A is the minor in the key of C. So the movement downward and to the minor brings a shift towards a serious or sad point. However, the next chord is an Aminor7, entirely comfortable inside the key of C. The Aminor7 quickly moves to a Gminor7, which mirrors the falling movement a couple bars earlier from Cmaj9 to Bbmaj7. Then the Gminor7 resolves to an Fmajor7, which if this song had been in the key of F would have been a 2m7 to the 1 change. But it’s actually moving from 5 to 4 in the key of C. And that is followed by a very quick Dm7 to G7, again the 2-5 movement.

Okay, I realize that if you understand music I sound like an idiot explaining this and if you don’t understand music it’s beyond you. Help me, folks. I’m trying here.

That was the first verse. The chorus has two sections. The first section returns to the root with a C2, I employ similar ear tricks with the chording. The second part of the chorus gets tricky, immediately going from an Fmaj7 to a Bb9#11 (I won’t even go there). But the effect of the next eight bars is much like jazz comping where chord changes come fast enough so that things are interesting, but the melody itself stays simple. The chorus then resolves into that simple little piano riff that starts the song.

The bass part is fairly simple due to all of the “confusion” of the chord changes. The bass part generally roots the song and here the bass pretty much stays with the root note of each chord. In simpler chord changes it’s nice to have the bass bounce around and make things more interesting, but here you don’t want to add to the confusion.

The guitar at the beginning of the first verse plays a baritone part, pretty much mimicking the bass. The guitar has a bit of tremolo which suggests some of the old rockabilly guitar stylings. At the beginning of the first chorus the guitar begins picking notes in the chord, making the guitar part a little more interesting. In the second part of the chorus the guitar begins strumming, which adds a little power to the chorus. And in most songs the chorus is where the point of the narrative is driven home.

In popular music dynamics are important. Even when there’s a lack of dynamics that in a way delivers a message to the listener. It’s like sex. The intro is foreplay, you get started, eventually you build to a climax. You have a cigarette.

“She Looked Back” follows the general rules. The verses state something, the meaning or message of the song is defined or generalized in the chorus. The first part of the chorus goes: “She looked back at me. What did she see?” At that point in each verse there is speculation as to what she had seen. The second part of the chorus goes: “Some folks may say it’s fate, some folks call it destiny./I’m just glad that she looked back at me.” Kind of a folksy statement that things worked out well.

The song is vaguely about the first date Girlfriend and I went on. You know, a meeting in a public place, a little talking, and let’s see where it goes. We’d chosen to meet at a coffee shop near the beach in Pacifica. When we were about to leave the shop I dropped my hat and was looking around for it and she looked back. The song speculates about what was going through her mind at that moment. Because she could have easily dismissed me as a dork and that would have been that. So what did she see? And it kind of plays around with the little choices we face from moment to moment. How if you maybe said something to a stranger how your life may have changed forever. And if you didn’t say anything it didn’t. Something or someone amazing might have walked right past. Anyway, that’s roughly the plot of the story, although from the lyrics (which have not been completed) you don’t know that we’re on a first date. We could be passing strangers. Which we were in a sense.

Back to the music.

The first chorus resolves into that simple piano part. The drums, which had built throughout the first verse and chorus, calm down. Verse two comes, which advances the story, goes into the chorus. But this time the guitar part for the second verse does not mimic the bass but starts out with the picking. When the second part of the second chorus hits suddenly there’s a new instrument: the pedal steel guitar. In many pop songs this would be where a string or horn section would come in to reinforce the chorus. Here, in order to further enforce the idea that this is a country song, I use a country instrument. But the pedal steel plays like strings, high, holding notes. And with lots of reverb to make it fill the background.

(I’ll note right now that this entire thing was composed on computer. The pedal steel part was originally a string part. While it’s set back in the mix I’m not entirely satisfied with it because it’s not “pedal steely” enough. I’ll need to put in bends and such to make it sound more realistic.)

The pedal steel continues in the background through the solo. The solo itself is the tremolo guitar, but louder and boosted with reverb. It’s playing across the complex chords and has a jazzy feeling to it, but hopefully still keeping a toe in the country genre.

Then the song goes right into the third chorus. The pedal steel disappears. It’s the piano chording along with the guitar back to playing a baritone part where you get to those longer notes kind of broinging. When the song hits the second part of chorus not only does the pedal steel return, but there are also fiddles panned to the other side of the stereo spectrum. I say fiddle instead of violin because it’s a more fiddle-ish sound than, say, a concert violinist.

The second part of the chorus repeats and then the song resolves to the opening piano riff as things calm down to an end. But before the chorus repeats it lands on a solid C chord. No confusing augmentations. The lyrics are absolutely positive and the chords are too. A solid C. And that C rolls into a C-Am-F-G progression, the most basic progression in American pop music. Then the final chorus. Then the simple piano line. Done.

March 09, 2011

The nearly 20-year study reveals that in 2006, a year in which comparable results for mass loss in mountain glaciers and ice caps are available from a separate study conducted using other methods, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost a combined mass of 475 gigatonnes a year on average. That's enough to raise global sea level by an average of 1.3 millimeters (.05 inches) a year. (A gigatonne is one billion metric tons, or more than 2.2 trillion pounds.) Ice sheets are defined as being larger than 50,000 square kilometers, or 20,000 square miles, and only exist in Greenland and Antarctica while ice caps are areas smaller than 50,000 square km.

The pace at which the polar ice sheets are losing mass was found to be accelerating rapidly. Each year over the course of the study, the two ice sheets lost a combined average of 36.3 gigatonnes more than they did the year before. In comparison, the 2006 study of mountain glaciers and ice caps estimated their loss at 402 gigatonnes a year on average, with a year-over-year acceleration rate three times smaller than that of the ice sheets.

"That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising -- they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers," said lead author Eric Rignot, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and the University of California, Irvine. "What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening. If present trends continue, sea level is likely to be significantly higher than levels projected by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. Our study helps reduce uncertainties in near-term projections of sea level rise."

March 08, 2011

March 07, 2011

A new study in the Journal of Food Science provides some limited scientific evidence to support the theory among beer enthusiasts that Guinness tastes much better in Ireland than other parts of the world.

Over a period of one year, four researchers of different nationalities traveled to 14 countries and visited 71 Guinness serving establishments in 33 cities to collect data for 103 tastings.

Tasting scores for pints of Guinness were generally high all around the world, yet tastings in pubs in Ireland scored significantly higher.

This difference remained statistically significant after adjusting for researcher, pub ambience, Guinness appearance, and the sensory measures of mouthfeel, flavor and aftertaste. Please note that results are subject to further verification because of limitations in the study design.

March 06, 2011

March 05, 2011

I am in the middle of a very frustrating computer, uh, episode. Again it has to do with my music program stuff. What is very cool now is that you can run signals through audio effects that are digital programs. That is, if you want a reverb you can get a reverb program and tailor your sound to whether you want your guitar to sound like it's in a closet or the Taj Mahal. You know, just by flipping through different digital patches.

It's simple and elegant except because it's digital it's easily copied and stolen. Thus, companies who spend money developing these things think of all sorts of ways to prevent people from stealing them. And, unfortunately, sometimes it seems impossible to actually install a program because of all the crap you need to go through.

My instant problem is my new Amplitube Fender program, made by IK Multimedia. I got another program from them, one that emulates all those Mellotron instruments. Unfortunately, that program didn't install right. I just figured since I was working on music that didn't use Mellotrons that I'd get back to it later.

But I'm having problems with this Amplitube too. It comes with a serial number. When you go through the process of registering it and enter the serial number the company sends you two more numbers, one of them is something like 24 digits, that you have to reenter. It took the first number but then rejected the second number which was the very number that IK Multimedia had just sent me.

When I emailed the website to complain I got a message saying that I should download their "Authorization Manager" which will help me authorize the program. Unfortunately, it took me three tries to install the Authorization Manager. Then it didn't recognize that the program was on my computer and tried downloading the program somewhere else in my computer. I need the program to sit inside an effects folder within my music recording program (Sonar, if you're interested) or otherwise Sonar doesn't recognize it.

So as it stands I've got a few hundred dollars worth of software from IK Multimedia that won't work.

It would be nice if there was an actual person I could talk with. Or yell at.